In just a few years, Pierre Konrad Dadak rose from a small-time Parisian fraudster to become a top representative for one of Central Europe’s biggest arms companies. The Spanish police who arrested Dadak believe he is a global arms trafficker, in bed with the French gangsters. His former business partners say his arms deals were fakes, designed to defraud them of money. Either way, high-level connections in his ancestral Poland appear to have protected him.

Jaroslav Strnad, the chief financial backer of the Czech president, has been secretly snapping up arms stockpiles and factories throughout the Balkans with the help of a cast of notorious local characters. The buy-up has included tens of millions of rounds of old ammunition of a type so unreliable that a previous attempt to sell it inspired a Hollywood movie.

Amonullo Hukumov, the former head of Tajik Railways, has told the media that neither he nor his wife own any real estate abroad. But records obtained by OCCRP show that his family has spent over $10.7 million on luxury real estate in two of the Czech Republic’s most popular tourist destinations. The hefty price tag raises questions about the source of the family’s wealth.

The historical building at the heart of Karlovy Vary (center), which Amonullo Hukumov's wife Amina Musaeva bought in 2014 for $4.4 million. Credit: Pavla Holcova

Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte is the Person of the Year for 2017, according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), an organization that has for six years recognized the individual who has done the most in the world to advance organized criminal activity and corruption.

A school in a remote town in South Africa owned by a chicken farmer with a checkered business history was chosen by that country’s national lottery to handle almost US$ 3.7 million in grant money intended to help poor or under-served communities.

Journalists have called the case one of the most expensive in British history: One Ukrainian businessman demanded US $2 billion from two others in the London High Court in a dispute over one of their home country’s largest iron ore processing operations. The three reached a secret settlement several days before the trial. But reporters found the details of that settlement, which involved two high-value buildings in the heart of London, in the Paradise Papers documents.

A key player in the Azerbaijani Laundromat -- a slush fund and money-laundering scandal that has already led to the resignation of members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe -- has gained a foothold in Vienna’s “Golden Quarter.”